The Coca-Cola Art of Jim Harrison by Jim Harrison

Author:Jim Harrison
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: University of South Carolina Press
Published: 2016-03-14T04:00:00+00:00

The First Coca-Cola Painting

One week I had everything ready and packed for the weekend show, and I was just playing around at the easel. I took a 10" by 20" canvas and painted the background red. I cut around the trademark Coca-Cola leaving it white as I had done many times on much larger wall bulletins. I filled in the white letters and finished it off with a black outline and shadow around the letters. It was nothing more than just the Coca-Cola trademark against a red background on the canvas. Liking it and thinking it was “cool,” I did two more in similar sizes and framed all three with our silver-and-black floater molding. I stuck them in one of the packing boxes with 45 dollars priced on the back of each one.

Set up time at the Orlando show started early in the morning of the first day, and often some serious buyers walked around during that time, hoping to get first choice on something they liked. The first shopper to come by our spot quickly bought one of the Coca-Cola paintings, and that was the beginning of 40-plus years of Jim Harrison Coca-Cola fine art. The second and third paintings also sold that first day. This was in the early seventies, and there was not the Coca-Cola memorabilia craze as we know it now. I knew immediately I was on to something, and I couldn’t wait to get back to Denmark and fool around with some more Coca-Cola paintings.

The next week I did several similar paintings and four more with some variety of yellow or green borders adding the word drink. Amazingly the six new paintings brought us six new buyers at the next show. In the following weeks new wrinkles and some variety was added to more Coca-Cola paintings. The canvas was painted so as to resemble country-store wood siding, both horizontal and vertical. One weird canvas was square so I painted only the first few letters of the trade mark. Larger canvases and increased prices did not seem to slow down the selling. I was excited, and I began in earnest to research the designs of the earlier Coca-Cola signs. Although I experimented with other trademarks in a similar fashion and did get favorable responses to the different product names, nothing matched the success of the popular Coca-Cola trademark.

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